The vast world of market activity that happens outside the state's routine tax, licensing, and labor-protection systems — street vendors, cash work, unlicensed workshops, day laborers — which by ILO estimates accounts for the majority of employment globally, challenging the idea that formality is the norm and informality the exception.
On almost any street in Accra, Lagos, or Lima, the economy is fully visible: vendors selling phone credit, mechanics working under open-air awnings, women frying plantains at folding tables. Prices are set, goods change hands, wages are paid. But much of it appears in no tax register or business license — even when labor-force surveys try to measure it. It is real economic life — buying, selling, working — conducted entirely outside the state's ledger. The economist Keith Hart noticed this in Ghana in the early 1970s and gave it a name: the informal economy. His question was not whether this activity was legitimate. It clearly was. His question was why economics had been built as if it did not exist.